this figure performed so many miracles some few years after, that the whole loggia was for some time filled with images placed therein “ ex voto”, and the figure is still held in the highest veneration.[1]
Finally, in the chapel belonging to Messer Ridolfo de’ Bardi, in the church of Santa Croce, wherein Giotto depicted the life of St. Francis, Ugolino painted an altar-piece in distemper, the subject a Crucifixion, with St. John and the Magdalen weeping, and a monk standing on each side of these figures.[2]
Ugolino departed from this life in the year 1349,[3] being then very old, and was honourably entombed in his native city of Siena. But, returning once more to Stefano, this master is said to have been a good architect also, and what we have related above may serve to confirm the truth of the assertion. He died, as is recorded, in the year of jubilee 1350, at the age of forty-nine, and was buried in the tomb of his forefathers, in the church of Santo Spirito, where the following epitaph, was placed over his remains:—
“ Stephano Elorentino pictori, facundis imaginibus ac colorandis dguris nulli unquam inferiori, Affines mcestiss. pos. Vix. an. xxxxix.”
- ↑ For a minute account of this oratory and picture, see Baldinucci and Villani, ut supra.
- ↑ It is not known where this picture now is, and it is very probably tost.
- ↑ Ugolino died in 1339, and the above date is a mistake of Vasari’s,
or a misprint of his second edition: the date given in the first edition,
where the life of Ugolino stands separately, being 1339: that biography
is there closed by the following epitaph, which Vasari omitted in his
second edition:—
- “Pictor divinus jacet hoc sub saxo Ugolinus,
- Cui Deus aeternam tribuat vitamque supernam.”
